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“You know, I just don’t think it’s fair,” muses Annie. The early morning sunlight glints through her hair and makes her eyes sparkle. Finnick can hardly look away. “You’ll win every race we ever do. You’re, like, a foot taller than me. It shouldn’t even be a competition.”
“Oh, I get it,” Finnick replies. It’s an effort to keep his voice even when he’s still breathing so heavily from the race they only just finished. “It’s only a competition if you’re winning?”
Annie shrugs. A smile tugs at her mouth but she doesn’t confirm or deny anything.
They’re trudging through the sand on the Village’s private beach, waiting for their heart rates to come back down. He’ll never admit it to Annie, but Finnick really put his all into that race and only barely won. Then they both jumped in the ocean to cool off, and the only thing that stopped them from having another race in the water was the promise of fresh baked muffins in Annie’s kitchen.
He knows Annie still wakes up early, a remnant of her old training schedule. Finnick can’t stand waking up early, and the only reason he’s out here now is because he hadn’t even gone to bed last night. Not for lack of trying, though. He can fall into a few hours of light sleep, but every small sound sends his brain into overdrive. The creak of the floorboards, the click of a door shutting, water rushing through the pipes. No detail is too small for his brain to latch onto, so eventually Finnick stops trying to sleep. With any luck, he’ll stop thinking at all.
“What are your plans for today?” he asks Annie as they walk. They climb the creaky wooden stairs that connect the beach to the paved pathway of the Village. The familiar houses rise into Finnick’s line of vision.
Annie shrugs. "Other than trying the muffins I made? Not much."
"Same," says Finnick.
"I guess you'll just have to come over," she offers. "We'll find a movie to watch or something."
They’re still chatting quietly about nothing when they reach Annie’s door. “I’m going to take a quick shower,” she says, heading for the stairs. “Don’t eat any muffins yet or I’ll know. I want to try them at the same time.”
“How would you know?” Finnick asks as she retreats.
Annie doesn’t look back as she heads upstairs. “I’ll know!”
“Did you count them?” he calls. “Annie! Did you count them?”
She doesn’t answer. Finnick decides not to eat a muffin because she probably would know. And she probably did count them.
It’s only been about a minute when Annie calls his name from upstairs. Finnick abandons his glass of water and takes the stairs two at a time, stopping when he sees Annie at the linen closet in the hallway. She’s in a puffy blue bathrobe and her hair is wet and tangled from saltwater. She always says she hates when her hair gets like that, but suddenly Finnick can’t imagine anything prettier.
“Hey, sorry,” she says. “I forgot I was doing laundry yesterday and my towel still isn’t dry and the clean ones are all the way on the top shelf. Could you grab one for me?”
“Oh, yeah,” he says after a second, easily reaching to the top shelf and grabbing a towel. He can barely feel the fabric under his fingers because he’s so preoccupied by something much more important.
“Thanks,” she says. Annie turns to leave, then turns back. “By the way, I think you left your toothbrush in my bathroom.”
When Finnick looks back on this moment, he’ll never know why it was that sentence that did it for him. He’s never found anything romantic in toothbrushes. But the feeling comes on too suddenly to do anything about it. One second he and Annie are standing face to face in her upstairs hallway. The next second, his lips are on hers; he can still taste the salt from the ocean; their teeth clash; he thinks Annie might be laughing a bit. Finnick pulls away just as quickly, barely registering the look on Annie’s face. Her eyes crinkle like she’s confused, but then she smiles.
“I have to go,” he says quickly, stomach churning.
“What?” Annie asks, dumbfounded.
Finnick runs.
“Wait, I’m sorry,” says Coral, holding up her hand in disbelief. “He kissed you and then he ran away?”
“Yeah,” says Annie glumly. “I bet it’s because I hadn’t taken a shower yet. My hair always looks disgusting when I get out of the ocean.”
“It looks fine to me,” offers Dylan. Annie gives him an appreciative smile.
After Finnick left her house, Annie changed into real clothes and went straight to Coral. She’s never been particularly close with Coral, but for some reason the choice just felt right. Coral had been drinking coffee at her kitchen table and chatting with Dylan, and Annie had no objections to Dylan hearing the story too. So here they are.
“No, hon, it’s not that,” says Coral, softer this time. She leans forward a bit. “How was the kiss, though?”
Heat rises in her cheeks. Annie feels like a teenager again, telling her friends how she kissed Atlas in the hallway after training. “I don’t know, it was weird. And fast.”
Coral and Dylan exchange a weighty glance. “Have you kissed someone before?” Coral asks eventually.
“Yeah, when I was younger. It’s not like it meant anything. And not since before my Games.”
“Well, it's good you've had some experience,” Dylan offers. “Besides, him running probably had nothing to do with you and everything to do with him.”
“I just wish I knew what he was thinking,” Annie says. She buries her head in her arms and groans.
Coral squeezes her shoulder gently. “There’s no way to know what he’s thinking until you ask him. Let’s talk about you, okay? Did you want to kiss him?”
“Yeah,” says Annie without thinking. “I’ve been wanting to for a while. I thought we were both feeling it, and it was only a matter of time.”
Dylan sips his coffee. “Maybe Finnick didn’t know it would happen.”
Coral pours another cup of coffee and slides it over to Annie, who wraps her hands around it. The warmth leeches into her palms, grounding her. “How could he not have known?”
“These things can come on suddenly,” Coral points out. “You know what I think it was? I think he hadn’t planned on it, then he did it, realized there was no taking it back, and got scared.”
“You’ll have to face her eventually,” says Mags.
Finnick buries his face in her couch cushion and mumbles something incomprehensible. Then, more audibly, “How?”
Mags joins him on the couch. “Well, that’s up to you. You kissed her, so now you both will need to decide what that means.”
“It means nothing,” he says. It comes out sharper than he intended. “It can’t mean anything, Mags. You know that.”
“I know you think that,” Mags counters. “Unfortunately I don’t think you’re right about this one.”
Finnick pulls himself upright and runs a hand through his hair. “What am I supposed to do? I kissed her, then I ran. Who does that?”
He knows who does that. Finnick Odair does that, in the Capitol and apparently in District Four too. Does she think he’s an asshole? A coward? He doesn’t even want to know.
“Finnick,” says Mags, reaching for his hand. “Why did you kiss her?”
“Because,” he says, but he can’t quite articulate a good enough reason. “I don’t know. I wanted to. And I felt like she wanted me to.”
“Do you want something to come of it?”
The beginnings of a headache pounds at his temples. Dryness overcomes his mouth, and wordlessly Mags slides him a glass of water across the coffee table. Finnick takes a sip and lets it linger in his mouth before answering. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”
For some reason he expects Mags to be disappointed in his lack of restraint, but her face broadens into a smile. She presses a kiss to the top of his head like she used to when he was a kid. “Then I’m glad you’re here.”
“I don’t understand,” he says. The whole situation is so mortifying that he wants the couch cushions to swallow him whole.
“It’s natural to want this, Finnick. Healthy, even. Repressing it will only do you more harm. I honestly think this could be good for you.”
“It’s dangerous,” Finnick replies. “Not just for me. If anyone found out…”
Mags doesn’t let him continue into a catastrophic spiral. “Is living the way you are not dangerous? Putting your life on hold until the Capitol is finished with you, no matter how long it may take?”
He gives a wordless shrug.
“Whether you pursue a relationship with Annie or not, it won’t be easy,” Mags says, softer. “I know. But it’s up to you two whether you make the most of your time here or you don’t.”
By the time she leaves Coral’s house, it’s already noon. Annie opens her front door half expecting to see that Finnick has come back, but the house is still and empty. The muffins are still sitting nicely arranged on a plate on her kitchen table, but Annie doesn’t touch them.
She’s just pouring herself a glass of lemonade when a knock sounds at her door. She quickens her pace to the door but then waits a few seconds so she doesn’t look too eager. The door creaks as she swings it open, and it’s Finnick waiting on her porch.
“Hi,” he says, before she can say a thing. His hair is tousled and his shoulders are weighed down by some invisible force. “Can I come in?”
“Of course,” Annie says. She steps aside and he walks a few steps into the house. The whole thing feels oddly stilted.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he says. They’re standing in the middle of her foyer, like the conversation is too urgent to even move to another room first. “I shouldn’t have run out like that.”
“I didn’t think the kiss was that bad,” Annie agrees, mostly just to lighten the mood. His mouth twitches.
“It wasn’t. You were great. I just freaked out.”
She nods. “Do you want to tell me why?”
Finnick swallows harshly. “There are some things I can’t really talk about yet. I will, eventually, just…not now. But if we’re going to do this, you should know something.”
“Okay,” Annie agrees, to fill the space left by his pause.
He starts to pace like he does when he gets nervous. “I like you,” he says slowly.
“I like you too.”
“Okay, good.” She catches a flash of a smile before it disappears. “But I don’t always get to control who likes me. Or who I’m with. And because of that, we can’t be open about whatever this is. Do you…understand what I’m saying?”
Annie nods. It looks like the words are physically painful for him, like he’s pulling them through his throat one at a time with extreme effort. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,” she says, and his shoulders deflate in relief. “Just do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
“Next time we kiss, just stay here for a second.”
“Yeah,” says Finnick, a little dazed. “When is the next time?”
“I was thinking now,” Annie suggests. “If that’s okay.”
“That works for me.”
She takes a few slow steps towards him. Their second kiss lasts longer than the first. He relaxes under her touch. They’re both smiling by the time they pull away.
“Want to sit down?” Annie asks. “You seem like you’re going to pass out.”
“I think I might be tired,” he admits. “Hey, is it too late in the day for muffins?”
She shrugs as they walk to the kitchen. “I don’t really think there’s a time limit.”
Finnick slumps into one of her kitchen chairs. Annie joins him at the table and they each take a muffin. “Ready?” asks Finnick. Annie nods.
When she bites into the muffin, it’s dry and crumbly and sticks in her throat. Annie coughs a little and washes it down with lemonade. Finnick makes a valiant attempt to keep his expression positive, but even he breaks when Annie says, “That was disgusting.”
“I wouldn’t say disgusting,” Finnick offers.
“No, I definitely need to get better at making muffins,” Annie replies. “I can’t believe we went through all that for muffins that weren’t even good.”
Then they lock eyes and dissolve into laughter for so long that Annie’s sides start to hurt.